I rented the film Ravenous last weekend. I'm not going to mention any spoilers, but it told a good tale. The transition from period-piece to straight-up action flick was disappointing, though, because I liked the occasional attempts to address the historical context. Soon after one character talks about the relentless American drive for westward expansion in the 19th century, a stereotypical chase scene occurs, as a merry banjo instrumental plays in the background. I couldn't figure out what they were trying to achieve-- each time the track popped up, it ruined an otherwise visceral clarity.

Cannibal Ox don't have that problem with their debut LP on Def Jux Records, The Cold Vein. "Iron Galaxy," which originally appeared in 2000 on a split EP with Company Flow, begins the album. Vast Aire and Vordul rap an abstract refrain, "My shell, mechanical found ghost/ But my ghetto is animal found toast," a taste of the tortured environment they document in their hometown New York City. Vordul grabs the mic and busts for 2½ minutes, beginning with the end of life and ending with a near-hopeless call for peace. Vast Aire then takes a microscope to the street, descending into prose so dense and depraved that the stomach lurches. I don't want to ruin the surprises lurking around every corner in this verse, but imagine the sonic background, served up by Company Flow CEO El-P, who's taken the duo underneath his wing and produced the album: looped beats remain discrete while UNKLE-like synth chords bubble upwards, colliding with an old-school video game sample that accelerates until the last few seconds of the song sound like a Richie Hawtin rave-up.

"Ox Out the Cage" brings a more trad rap feel, complete with the "I'd like to introduce... " narrative. But both MC's strive to pronounce flows in incredible salvos, rarely using chorus lines. Prose is the game here, and Vordul deals in rapid-fire verses that skip every other break to rhyme with the next-- Wu-inspired, but who isn't? Vast prefers a slightly slower pace, all the better to fight the war in his brain between concrete detail and mastermind abstraction. He delivers verses with a rising inflection that recalls RBX's self-impressed swagger, but this doesn't distract from lines like, "I grab the mic like Are You Experienced/ But I don't play the guitar, I play my cadence." Power chords accent the mix, but this ain't some crossover cock-rock revival. The rhythm here is aggressive; it turns caddy-slacking P-funk samples into hors d'oeuvres, shoves aside all those Jeep-ish Timbaland hi-hats and snare drums and devours the RZA's sinister string lines. The Cold Vein is like a musical negative, an inverse reflection of hip-hop history, full of everything DJ's cast aside, from Sega sound effects to electro-industrialism, gear-work grooves malfunctioning, synthesizers belching, a menagerie of digitalia.

The group has more facets than their brutality, though. Don't flinch when "Battle for Asgard" betrays its epic title by breaking up each verse with an interlude that sounds like circus music. There's room for humorous self-criticism in this relentless debut, but it works best in "Raspberry Fields," where Vast Aire cuts his flow short with, "Oh shit, I said a word twice," and starts again from the beginning. Eventually, all but the most hardcore heads will appreciate a break from the intensity. Two of the best tracks on The Cold Vein ease up just enough to show some humanity beneath the tough skin. In "A B-Boys Alpha," Vast Aire narrates a personal account of his life, from Freudian birthing trauma to the streets where "my first fight was me versus five boroughs." A booming choir of distortion wells in the background, strangely conjuring up reminiscence. "The F-Word" cools it down just enough to tell the story of a b-boy reluctant to fall in love; El-P keeps it real gritty with an urban melody that recalls Method Man's "All I Need."

Ultimately, Cannibal Ox inherit the mantle of the Wu-Tang Clan: you can polish your rhetorical teeth endlessly, but when your appetite is for violence you stay mired in the muck you rose from. At times you can't tell whether they want to break conventions or heads, or whether it's an either/or proposition. But witness the transition from disgust to critique here: "With beats that have to be registered as sex offenders before presented to the public/ I'll exfoliate your face with the acid inside my stomach/ Binge and purge/ We live in thirty-second blurbs/ And if consumers stop existing we forget how to use words/ Just fuckin' eat each other 'til the next ice age occurs. " Here's to Cannibal Ox transcending the Wu's paranoid conspiracy theories and truly dropping critical science. But enough of the bullshit, The Cold Vein is going to be on everybody's year-end list of the best underground hip-hop. Consume it, just watch it doesn't consume you.

-Christopher Dare